


Marv

by EnglishLanguage



Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types
Genre: Hopeful Ending, It's either a Bit or a Gridbug there's nothing in between, Marv is "the Family", Marv is now a benevolent god, Meet the Family, Mental Instability, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Other, Scars, Self-Worth Issues, The User World is Weird, Tron just has issues that's it, Very mild body horror, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-28 03:34:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20057344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishLanguage/pseuds/EnglishLanguage
Summary: The transition from the Grid to the user world isn't easy on the programs who go through it.Marv helps.





	Marv

**Author's Note:**

> It's come to my attention that I haven't given Marv the love he deserves in any of my fics. This is my attempt to fix that. :]
> 
> Part 1 focuses on Quorra. Part 2, on Tron.

1.

When Quorra comes online, she searches first for the energy fields around her and finds nothing.

_ Nothing? _

Her eyes snap open; wires of panic strung through her body, head to toe, seem to twist and tighten. She twists with them, and the rough ground is the next stimulus she detects as she claws the floor, splitting the tips of her nails.

Below her, pressing against her bare skin, a mottled, dark-and-pale surface extends into the shadow cast by a wall. She follows it with her eyes, then with a tentative brush of one hand, and discovers the variegated coloring of the floor is actually a layer of debris- fibers and fine, grey particles. The debris scatters with a flick of her fingers, then catches and _ floats _on her short, startled exhale.

Small clumps of it cling to the back of her knuckles, faintly soft against her skin. Irritating to the touch.

Dizzy, Quorra turns her focus inward, to her own body.

Nothing hurts, not exactly.

But everything is stiff with an exhaustion she can’t explain, and she shivers with a vague sense of cold. By the users, Quorra has never been cold like this; the hard floor beneath her, the air surrounding her body are both frigid, tight and stagnant, void of energy. Completely _frozen._

Rolling her shoulders up to her ears, pulling her knees up to her chest, Quorra clenches her chattering jaw, carefully regaining control over every pixel in her body. Unable to sense the positioning of her own circuits, she’s working half-blind…

Memories tug, obscured and deformed, at the back of her mind, but they’re rendered in a color she doesn’t think she’s programmed to detect. It takes her a nano to stagger through the fog, to feel out the distinct edges-and-corners of her recollections and make out their shape: _White-blue light, reaching up, reaching down forever, and so much energy pouring, flooding; did it damage me?_

She recalls the portal to the users’ world. Flynn gone, derezzed. And Sam…

“Sam?” Quorra whispers. She can’t detect his presence, his light.

Something- some massive, _ tangible _fear- thunders in her chest.

Confused, she squeezes her eyes closed, trying to ignore the sensation- she made it through the portal alive, it wouldn't be fair for her to derez now. Her body pulses again, reverberations crashing through her, and Quorra can't ignore the problem any longer.

There’s something loose inside her. It's as if a fluid-filled cavity opened in her chest, as if derezzed voxels are spilling into it, kicking liquid up against her insides.

“Sam- _ Sam!” _

“Quorra?” His footsteps fall on the off-beats of the swollen, rapid drumming inside her, and Sam drops into a crouch by her side, face carved with furrows of rigid alarm. “Quorra, are you okay?”

“There’s something inside me-” Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth as she speaks; her voice is wet. “I’m- I’m-”

“Easy, Quorra,” Sam soothes. His hands, as he flips her on her back, feel steady. Quorra, after all, is breaking apart from the inside out, so it’s only when his grip loosens that she notices his fingers shaking. “What are you feeling? Tell me.”

“Pulsing,” she replies. “Something _ pulsing, _in here.” Gesturing to her chest, she gags on an uneven gasp, her ventilation cycles running as fast and hard as user breathing. 

“I hear you.” 

Sam’s palm flattens against her skin, just below her clavicle. Seemingly unaware of it, he chokes out a litany of faint reassurances- “It’s okay, ‘s okay, ‘s okay-” but the words wobble, hollow, and Quorra doesn’t want to listen.

Careful fingers drift up the length of her throat, eventually settling in the soft juncture between her jaw and her neck. Quorra focuses on the point of contact between Sam’s fingers and her skin, feels the side of her throat jump, bulging out, in a frenzied rhythm. She’s falling apart; she should feel pain, system failures, _ anything _beyond this numb haze of terror…

“It’s a heart.”

“What?”

“A heart,” Sam repeats, and his voice quivers with a quality of reverence, of awe. “A sort of system vital for maintaining life. Here.” He takes her hand, and the chafe of his warm, calloused skin against her frozen fingers hurts like he’s scrubbing her away- pixel by pixel- straight down to her source code. 

“Feel this,” he orders, placing her palm against his own chest. “I have a heart, too, right... yeah, right around there.”

And inside Sam’s body, moving at a far calmer, gentler pace, something also pulses. 

“Just like you,” he reassures her, rubbing a thumb over her knuckles. “The portal changed how you work. That’s all.”

Quorra remembers reading about hearts- they’re mechanisms, as far as she understood, attached to channels similar to circuits, capable of pumping blood through the body. Hearts ensure life, functionality. Unlike programs, who feel emotion in their circuits, users feel it in their hearts.

“I’m not a user,” is all she can think to say, and it’s hard to pay attention past the thought _(_dark, red, _ crimson, _so many words to describe it and none of them adequate) that she can now bleed.

“You work like one, now.” Sam’s laughter is half soft, half strained in odd places. “Your hand’s _ cold, _Q-”

It is cold. She clenches her fingers in the dull-colored, flimsy fabric of his clothing, seeking the warmth radiating from deep inside his skin. “Gimme your other hand,” Sam requests, and Quorra does. Clasping his hands around both of hers, Sam exhales in loud, forceful huffs, blowing hot air against their tangled fingers.

Gradually, in a slow, dizzy descent, Quorra’s ventilation- _ breathing?- _slows.

If she has a heart, does she have lungs? Does she need oxygen to live? To test the theory, Quorra stiffens every muscle in her body until something catches just right in her chest- her intake of air cuts off sharply.

“You good, Q?” Sam asks, absentminded, and Quorra finally realizes how the world is dulling to grey at the edges, how her head has grown heavy, lolling...

“I’m good,” she lies, taking a deliberate breath. “I’m- fine. Is it always like this for users?”

“Like what?” Sam wiggles his arms out of the loose, armor-thick material- like a cloak, albeit shorter- draped around his shoulders. He tucks it around her torso, pulling the open edges tight around her chest, with a satisfied hum. 

For a nano, she peeks down the collar of her covering, confirming that she didn’t see incorrectly; her circuits really _are _gone. “Like your body is there, but you can’t sense what's moving inside it. There are no readings, no information." She struggles to descrbe the difference through a language barrier, through the remnants of panic still aching inside. "Like it’s dark in your head.”

Without her circuits, Quorra has no connection to the energy inside or outside of her. Before, on the Grid, patterns of electricity would illuminate the motions of her code, and she could sense every twitch, every involuntary tic, lighting up like neon in her body. Here, though...

“Not dark,” she amends on a whim. “Like your body is invisible to you.”

The short-robe twisted around her shoulders is glossy to the touch, still soaked through with the heat of Sam’s body, and the material collapses against her with a near-clumsy stiffness. Gripping the edges of it, Quorra curls up on herself, snuggling into the clothing.

“'Invisible,'" Sam muses. (He's confused, and does a terrible job at remaining subtle about it.) "Nah, I can't sense a thing going on on here," he finally responds, tapping a thumb against his chest. "It's normal," he adds, and bluntly switches the topic. "Hang on- you should have my shirt, too.”

_ Shirt?_

A ‘shirt,’ apparently, is the uselessly thin, faded-black item of clothing that hangs limply off Sam's shoulders. It doesn’t seem capable of providing protection or generating warmth; neither users nor ISOs retain circuits in the user world, so the shirt can’t dampen the effects of touch on circuitry. The shirt, in summary, doesn’t make sense.

Quorra lets him cover her crossed legs with it anyway, and learns that a shirt provides marginal support to her thermoregulation.

“I’ll call Alan,” Sam decides, speaking more to himself than to Quorra, “to get you some real clothes. Then we’ll take you home, figure out…” He pauses, blinking through what seems to be the same, cloudy disbelief that still hovers over Quorra’s mind. “We’ll figure out something,” he concludes, wrapping arms around his bare torso. “It’ll be okay.”

This time, there’s genuine confidence in his ‘okay,’ and Quorra tries to believe everything will work out.

It’s not that there's more or less stimuli in the users’ world than in the Grid. It’s just that sensation in the users’ world is different, as if reality shifted a few pixels to the left.

On the Grid, Quorra relied on her ability to detect the energy in her surroundings. Here, she has no circuits and no connection to whatever forms of energy govern the users. Instead, she uses sight and smell, physically off-balance in a way she's never experienced before.

There’s a lack, she now realizes, of visible light on the Grid; where light does exist, it beams from specific sources, intense in color and brightness, hard at the edges. In Sam's world, light illuminates everything, with a diversity of colors, brightnesses, and other characteristics. It’s so radiant in this world that only a _ lack _of light, rather than a presence of it, catches the attention of her overwhelmed mind. 

And there isn’t much to smell on the Grid. Variants of energy, especially the consumable kinds, have scents. The Outlands reek of metallic build-up, of something new and scorched and still unpolished. Other than that, the Grid smells of nothing.

The user world drowns beneath an ocean of scent, and Quorra's flounders, struggling to stay on top of it.

The road reeks of heated metal, of pungent burning- sharp, bitter, and filthy. The wind is so clogged with odor, so heavy, she can hardly understand how the gusts of air lift off the ground.

At least this much is familiar- the wind whips past her face, peeling at the skin on her cheeks and nose like when she’d race, no helmet, through the flat stretches of the Outlands, Flynn clawing at the edge of his seat...

The world of the users is as far away from the Grid, from _ Clu, _ as Quorra thinks she can get. For that fact and that fact alone, she allows herself to stagger into, to gratefully lose herself in a contradicting tangle of sensations: the harsh roar of user vehicles scraping over pavement, the silver-white, lambent heat of the sun, and the _ stench. _

Eventually, she tucks her face into the back of Sam’s neck (even the collar of his clothing reeks, acrid) and hides from the world. Her nose is cold, stung by the coarse edges of the wind, so she settles the tip of it against Sam’s skin and lets the pain thaw out.

The muscles lining his neck are taut, pulled into cords, and she can tell he’s still agitated- among other responsibilities, regrets, and people, Sam left his mind back on the Grid.

They turn off the larger road, down a shallow spiral of a ramp, and onto a narrower street. 

The brown boxes are houses, Quorra decides, glancing to her side. (If she really wanted to, she could tug at Sam's elbow, tell him to stop and let her off. She could set her feet on the stinking, faded streets; she could _touch _the houses. But everything seems so distant, so impossible...)

She isn’t sure about the purpose of the opaque, green structures she sees in front of each house- decoration, probably. Quorra remembers reading about the taller green ones, the trees. The rest of them are plants, bushes, or grasses, and she doesn’t know how to distinguish between each category.

A new smell (thickly sweet, verging on acidic) catches her attention.

“What’s that? The smell?” she yells in Sam’s ear- he flinches away from her.

“Uh-” The curve of his back shifts, his chest swelling against her tightly wrapped arms, as he inhales. “Barbeque. Meat? Food?”

Meat. _ Animals, _Quorra thinks. The user world has animals. 

Sam’s vehicle rounds a corner, and the smell is gone.

Sam’s house ‘isn’t much, but it’s home.’

“Cheesy line, I know,” Sam muses, “but I think I’m obligated to say it in this kind of a situation.” Quorra thinks he’s teasing, but his mouth is so narrow, bitten lips pressed together, that she can’t tell if he’s frowning or attempting to smile.

Sam’s pants have two flat pouches in the front, another two in the back. The user reaches a hand into one of the pouches and takes out a bundle of dull metal; he inserts one jagged end of the bundle into a mechanism on his door, twists it, and pulls the door _ out- _

“It doesn’t slide into the wall,” Quorra observes.

“No.”

“That’s impractical.”

“Maybe.” Sam holds the door open for her, but she hesitates. From what she can see, the interior of the house is still, silent, but she doesn’t get accurate readings on her surroundings in this world.

Sam clears his throat with a rough exhalation, reaching up to comb through his hair with his free hand. Quorra's been around him long enough to interpret confusion and uncertainty in the gesture, an implied question of ‘What’s wrong?’

“Do you live by yourself?” Quorra wonders. 

“Basically,” Sam replies, swallowing noisily. The sound irritates her, so she leans away from it.

The noise, really, isn't what's bothering Quorra, but she has talent in something Flynn would call 'compartmentalization.'

“Before you ask," continues Sam, "living alone isn’t normal for users.”

“It isn’t normal for programs, either.” _ Users, _ Quorra knows how it feels to be alone. She always had Flynn- Sam’s father- but she had him at a distance. After Sam was rescued from Clu, the most selfish fear Quorra harbored was that Sam would be envious of her, that he would think she had kept his father close and made him _ hers. _

Her most selfish relief is that Sam, with a mere glance, understood the truth.

Sam understands people, for all that he shuffles his feet and pretends otherwise. Following that logic, Quorra concludes that he possesses the charisma necessary to establish relationships; Quorra can't understand why the user hasn't, but she won't do him the discourtesy of asking. If someone were to ask Quorra why she’s so lonely, and if she had to explain how she was hunted, how it was decided her people were unworthy of interacting with other programs, of simply _ living… _If she had to explain to someone that she was more familiar with her mentor, a broken and reclusive stranger, than her own parents, she would shatter.

And either Quorra or the person antagonizing her would be derezzed. 

“I said _ basically _alone-”

Sam’s voice startles her, and Quorra throws her misery off her back, letting it break over her head like a wave. This is what it is to be a shoreline, a splintered cliff, on the border of the Sea of Simulation, half-smothered and half-free, thoroughly battered and rugged. 

“Quorra?"

"Sam," she acknowledges. Leaves it simple.

"Alright, Quorra, this is Marv. Marv, Quorra. No biting.”

Quorra looks down. “Sam? What is it?”

“He’s a dog.” Sam gestures vaguely at the creature. It’s only as tall as Quorra’s shins, slender in the chest and legs, but its voice contains all the force of a bomb as it yells. Cries? The sound has a dissonant, whining undertone; without doubt, the dog is expressing displeasure.

“He’s angry.” What did she _ do? _

“He doesn’t know you yet. Let him smell your hand- he won’t bite you.” Sam seems so certain of it. And yet- 

“I specifically remember you having to command the dog not to bite. That isn’t reassuring, Sam Flynn.”

“He’s a wimp. Wouldn’t bite anyone if he wanted to,” Sam says, “I’n’t that right, Marv?” 

At the sound of Sam’s voice, Marv generates a long, confused noise, shifting aside just enough for Quorra to finally step through the door into the house. Quorra tries to make herself unobtrusive, plastering the length of her body against a wall. Her heart beats faster with her nervousness, flushing her chest and face with heat- it’s not so different from the fear responses activated by a program’s circuitry.

Not _so_ different, but different enough.

Grunting, Sam lowers himself into a crouch, seizing the dog by its heaving shoulders. “Act friendly, dude,” he commands it, rubbing hands up and down Marv’s sides. “You can get closer, Q.”

She does.

If the dog attacks her, Sam will stop it, and neither Marv nor Quorra will have to sustain damage.

Tipping her head to one side, Quorra thoroughly analyzes Marv. He’s four-legged, like a bug, but he’s too small to pose a real threat. In fact, some aspect of the dog’s bulbous head and the rounded contours of its body reminds her of a Bit. Colored drab white with blotches of black, the dog is covered by a fine layer of stiff fibers; Quorra reaches out to touch, then thinks better of it. Her hands, halfway extended, flex in midair.

“You can pet him,” Sam encourages. “But- yeah, definitely let him smell your hand first.”

She dangles her hand in front of the dog’s face. Sniffing thickly, the dog nudges the wrinkled black pad of its nose against her knuckles- “It’s wet!” Recoiling, Quorra examines the cold smear on the back of her hand. “Sam, Marv is _wet_.”

Leaning in closer to the animal, she notices its big, black eyes are also glossy with moisture, and the animal smells damp, like stagnated energy. She doesn't understand the parameters for anything in this world; in the Grid, leaking would typically indicate damage. 

Sam bumps Marv’s nose with his thumb. “A little wet, yep. That’s normal.”

In the users' world, leaking apparently indicates 'dog.'

Marv smacks his mouth, more viscous fluid emerging from the depths of his throat. The saliva reeks with an odor she can’t classify and has no comparison for. 

Quorra decides Marv is generating wetness deliberately, if only to confuse her.

Cautiously defiant, she brings her hand back to Marv’s head, patting at the white bristles between sharp-edged ears. 

“Soft, hm?” Sam prompts.

“No,” she replies honestly. Her own hair is sleek to the touch; Sam’s hair, though she judges more by appearance than actual knowledge, seems to have a fuller, gentler texture. The dog’s hair feels brittle, and if she were to grab a handful and squeeze it, Quorra thinks the strands would snap to pieces in her hands.

Sam snorts, amused. “Okay, I guess fur isn’t the softest thing in the world.” He catches Marv’s face by the jaw and tilts the dog’s face upward. The two meet eyes, and Sam’s gaze is as gentle as Marv’s stare is avid, devoted. 

“Can he understand you?” Quorra asks, keeping her voice soft. Sam’s face relaxes _just so_ when he’s actually smiling, but she hasn’t seen him smile in a long time- not since she first rescued him, bringing him to Flynn.

“He understands some things.” Sam itches at the corner of Marv’s ear, sitting down completely on the floor. Quorra mirrors his position, crossing her legs and settling in. If Marv makes Sam happy, she also wants to spend time with Marv. And the dog is undeniably interesting; the Grid has nothing like Marv inside it. 

Except- possibly- Bits. Quorra's analysis in that regard is still incomplete.

Confidence comes slow to her, and she's hesitant as she moves to stroke the curve of Marv’s head- it’s small and delicate, and she momentarily fears breaking something inside the dog. 

“He likes that,” Sam notes, nodding at her. 

Marv’s large eyes are closed, now, and his entire body shudders with forceful, _ rancid _panting, four feet twitching on the floor. Quorra resolves to remember that these are signs of contentment in a dog. 

“There are so many alternative life forms in your world- I’ve read about them, in my books, but I thought dogs looked different than this.” She had imagined them more massive, threatening, intelligent. And though Marv is undeniably intelligent, his eyes speak more of mischief than nobility.

“We have different kinds of dogs,” Sam explains. “Different kinds of everything. Marv here, for example, is a Boston Terrier. The way I’d explain it?” He scuffs at the back of his neck. “The user world has far less order to it than the Grid, and it’s been around for a lot longer, too. We've had time for circumstances to just… branch off in all kinds of crazy directions, create a ton of weird life forms. It’s a diverse place with diverse beings.”

It’s beautiful, Quorra thinks.

“And users like that? The diversity?”

Sam’s mouth pulls into a careful line. “What did my dad tell you about our world?”

Quorra’s circuitry- or her heart, now- staggers, suddenly running cold. “He told me great things,” she admits, and Flynn was never a liar, but he always had an eye for exaggerated glory. 

He always had an eye for those peaceful, blue lights that illuminated every tower in Tron City, creating a beacon defiant against the ragged blackness of the Outlands. Too often, she caught him awake during his recharge-cycles, fixated on those peaceful, blue lights. And again, too often, Quorra had to bite back on her frustration.

What goodness could Flynn see on those lights, those circuits presiding over streets scorched by the spilled voxels and energy of her people?

_Those lights exist, Flynn, to display the death-stains of your ISOs._

Instinctively, Quorra tugs Marv into her lap. This is a different reality- the harsh lights if the Grid dont't exist here. Marv settles his cold nose in the space between her collarbones, startling her. Holding the dog tight, Quorra picks up on the leaping rhythm of his own, tiny heartbeat, feels fragile life in her grasp and focuses on _ that _ instead of her memories of destruction and of solitude and of being the _ last. _

“Flynn told me about your America,” she starts. Sam's eyes flick up to hers, but Quorra looks away, letting him stare at her forehead, instead. "He told me that users fought many wars for freedom, and every war proved that liberty triumphs in the end. And then I asked him not to talk about war-”

“Makes sense.”

“Hm.” The structure of Marv’s foot is tender, spongy, between her fingers. She pinches gently at a bony toe; Marv whuffles. “After that, Flynn told me about the wonders of this world. Canyons colored red as a sentry’s circuits, oceans larger than any of the seas on the Grid, and filled with strange animals. Fish…”

Flynn never liked fish- he described them as slimy, putrid, glassy-eyed bugs. (_Sure, they’re colorful, but they’re foul, man…)_

“Are fish really like bugs?”

“Bugs?” Sam’s upper lip twitches. “As in... Gridbugs?” Quorra nods; Sam shakes his head in a slow, sweeping motion. “Fish are nothing like bugs. They’re flat.”

“Flat?”

“Skinny. Round? They have these fins, almost like the wings on the Solar Sailer." He shrugs. "Y’know what- I’ll take you to see some fish sometime, okay?” 

Nodding, Quorra feels a reluctant grin drag across her lips. The faint warmth of it trickles through her body, down lines of skin where her circuits used to be, and she squeezes a squirming Marv more tightly in her arms. “He told me about salt," she continues, "the ocean is full of it. And it's rock, but users can _ eat _ salt on their food.” Her hands flutter over Marv’s back. “He never managed to code real salt, so I never got to try it, but Flynn said salt tastes sharp.”

“That’s one way to describe it,” Sam huffs, also smiling. Strangely enough, Sam’s real smiles look sad, even more so than his expressions of actual pain. The set of his eyebrows goes soft, and his gaze becomes something vast, cloudy and lost and saturated with unrecognizable emotion. By the time Quorra’s gaze falls from his eyes to his mouth, she’s felt every individual quirk and line in his expression settle heavy, feverishly warm, in her circuits.

(In her _ heart.)_

“I’m excited to see your world,” she tells him, trying to reassure him, to smooth that melancholy _glitch _of a smile off his mouth. “Even if it isn’t as perfect as Flynn wanted it to be.”

Beneath his fur, Marv’s skin is smooth, almost fluid in texture, and ripples beneath her fingertips- _ soft. _ His disgusting scent is comforting in its own way, overly sweet, and the quiver of his heartbeat is all at once reassuringly steady and barely detectable. If Marv has a heart, Quorra rather likes the idea of having one herself, of being in harmony_\- _as Flynn called it- with everything in this new life she was given.

This is her future. She’s in the user world, she’s safe, and she’s going to see the fish and eat salt someday.

Sam traces fingers over Marv’s wriggling tail, and the lopsided curl at the tip of it falls neatly around his hand. “I think perfection is overrated,” he states.

Quorra is inclined to agree.

* * *

2.

The ISO changed, Sam says, when she was transferred to the users’ world. Something in the complexity of her code allowed her to place her mind and her processes, into a new, unblemished body. All her imperfect data, all the damage inflicted on her throughout her runtime, were replaced with the smooth flesh and blood of a user.

A section of loose, aching code in her arm, prone to easy injury, where the limb was derezzed one too many times-

An uneven band of silvery, discolored voxels down her spine, the result of a Gridbug attack-

An unrepaired glitch in her left-side visual functions-

If Tron had wanted the ISO laid open like this, and if he wanted to understand her every injury and weakness, he would’ve torn her apart with a scan. Then, he would’ve split her from throat to abdomen and downloaded any additional information off her abandoned disk. Albeit more violent, the process would be _ as invasive _as Sam’s easy disclosure of her secrets.

He had explained as much to Sam; whether he managed to speak the words or merely traced them out on Sam's arm, he can't remember.

Sam had replied that the ISO had no secrets, and _that_, if nothing else, was said out loud. Sam is a user, a power above all else, with a voice like a storm, and where Tron is- a place apart from reality, a place of hollowed-out code and dead space- sound _echoes._

Sam said that Quorra didn't mind Tron knowing her vulnerabilites; if Sam trusted _ Rinzler, _she could learn to trust Rinzler, too. Sam's explanation seemed invalid, but his voice was law, and Tron wouldn't have argued even if he could've pulled the right words from his guttering core.

At least Quorra, unlike Sam, maintained some optimal functionality in her processes when she traveled to the users’ world. She still refers to him as Rinzler, remembering that he poses a threat.

Sam renamed him ‘Tron.’

He doesn’t have a preference for either name- Rinzler or Tron. Neither designation accurately describes him or his (inactive) directives. But he cares for User SamFlynn and for Sam’s desires, so he sorts through himself, refiles his data and memories under _ Unit Name: TRON-JA-307020. __I fight for the Users._

He formulates the thought, then repeats and _repeats_ it; he lets it cycle through his processors with a constancy that, in any other circumstance, he’d attribute to some looping glitch. This time, he can’t afford to forget.

The user world is like cotton.

Tron’s shirt is made of _ cotton. _Connected to the interior of his shirt, a loose tab reads: ‘100% cotton, made in Honduras, machine wash cold with like colors.’

Wrinkled with creases that seem to catch and absorb the heat of his circuits, the white cotton shirt hangs loose and thin over his torso. The tab inside it crumples against the back of his neck, and the tab’s straight edges brush against skin whenever Tron shifts his shoulders. Ultimately, the clothing provides no protection- only a source of irritating stimulation and the ever-present sensation of _ cotton. _

The shirt was originally Sam’s; the user has access to a variety of similar, white cotton shirts that he often wears. According to Tron’s assessments, Sam utilizes cotton clothing only during recharge. Curling around Tron’s body, Sam will ease into a state of dormancy- his slow exhalations glide smooth, warm, over Tron’s neck, and Sam’s shirt drags against Tron’s as the user breathes, chest swelling, deflating. 

Tron relearns taction against the curve of Sam’s body. He relearns it in terms of cotton and not-cotton, of Sam and not-Sam, and thinks he might be developing a syllogistic partiality toward that specific fabric.

The bed beneath Tron is also cotton; too thick, too plush, it sinks and bucks beneath his heavy shell, not unlike…

_ Not unlike falling into a dense and complete and eternal darkness. Not unlike pitch creeping into the cracks of broken armor, shattered helmet, lapping over cheeks, nose, eyes, over the raw black of old scars. The virus in the Sea was cold, brittle-sharp, so thin, seeping between each pixel- and his fingers, toes, hands, feet were the first things to go still. _

_ Unraveling him layer by layer, the virus stripped him down to nothing… _

_ But Clu was the first to strip Rinzler’s code, to make him into something small and scorched, crooked. No thought, no feeling. The only things Rinzler knew were Clu- luminary, master- and blind, red anger and ‘ _ you are imperfect’ _ and the crack of splintered voxels underfoot… _

_ The Sea stripped him down farther, to a level below even Clu’s violations, until there was nothing left of him but rawness, the core of his being- _I fight, I fight, I fight- 

_ After that, the remnants of Tron surged, and the Sea surged; a small fire of a program quivered in the unending ice._

Yes, the bed beneath Tron is also cotton. It’s dry, bright in color, _solid_ beneath his hands (not like a sea, not at all). It smells sweet, like all the clean, analog scents of the user world, nothing like the hot-cold stench of lightning that stained the dark corners of the Grid. And it's soft against his rawness, against his hardened edges, and flimsy in a way he never allowed himself to be.

(Now that he stops to think about it.)

Tron learns of user time according to cotton, discovering how the apparent color of the sheets change from faded-grey in the dimness of ‘night’ to a radiant paleness in the light of ‘morning’ to gold in the ‘afternoon.’ Often, he loses himself in the conflict destabilizing his code. At his base, he is _ I fight, I fight, I fight, _so Tron and Rinzler struggle against each other to interpret the directive. They leave behind carnage, and he goes numb. When Tron reboots, circuits lagging, he measures the duration of the system failure by the color change of the cotton sheets.

_ Everything, _in the end, is cotton.

The dry-soft kisses Sam chafes against Tron's forehead are cotton. It's also cotton when he wakes from nightmares and full-body glitches, from hard echoes of pain recorded in Rinzler’s half-sentience, to sheets and pillows and sun-through-windows. And his head feels thick with cotton, opaque, his memories lost in limp folds and creases. 

Today, Tron keeps his face burrowed into the mattress. With each glance upward, he feels as if mere nanos have passed, but the light on the sheets shows that _ hours _slip by between each instance of full awareness. His internal clock is damaged, overworked.

It’s 4:31 in the afternoon (he checks Sam’s clock to be sure) before some internal process finally clicks into place and Tron regains the ability to move his own body. A disconnect, an unrepaired scar, exists between his physical form and his intangible processes- unlike Quorra, Tron transferred to the users’ world with the same version of code he runs in the Grid, with the same defects and limitations. 

He isn’t worthy of a user’s body.

He isn’t even worthy of having sentience like a user, and Tron assesses that- logically- it would be easier to repair the Grid of the damage caused by Clu’s mindless slave by using the untiring service of an equally mindless, _ user-loyal _slave. Tron can’t calculate why Sam is trying so diligently to heal his mind. Reprogramming him into a state of compliance and full operability would produce more perfect, immediate outcomes. 

Reluctantly, he assigns a lower priority to this concern. 

The clock flashes, switching from 4:32 to 4:33. Stroking feeling into the cold circuitry lining his left arm, Tron scans his surroundings- the room around him looks still, undisturbed, and the house seems silent. 

As always, his circuits detect nothing more than the flat, hazy layer of energy that blankets the entire user world. On the Grid, energy lines running through the system and through programs create specific patterns, maps of light, color, temperature, even perceived texture. In the user world, faint waves of energy emit from almost everything, combining together into a featureless, uniform mass that Tron is incapable of navigating. A few energy sources- the sun, life forms in his immediate vicinity, the _ wiring _in the walls- stand out.

Moving gingerly, Tron rolls to the edge of the bed and onto the floor, landing soft on his toes. He thinks he’s alone in the house, which is uncommon- did Sam say he was leaving?

Searching through his recent memories, Tron prepares himself to find another glitched, unrecorded blank. To his surprise, he locates a relevant memory in a couple of nanocycles.

Sam had slipped out of bed, made a verbal note of the current time (3:15), and stated his need to ‘get groceries for dinner.’ The user had proceeded to mention that he would take Quorra with him, then Sam had kissed Tron on the forehead and left the room.

Sighing through his nose, Tron lowers himself back onto the bed. By Alan_One, what is he supposed to do? He has no purpose here, no directive; both under Clu’s command and that of the users, he operated as a security program, but Sam hasn’t shown any need for Tron’s protection. Rather, it’s been _ Sam _protecting Tron, holding him together while everything inside Tron aches to fall apart.

The door leading out of the room, as it always does in Tron’s periods of lucidity, tempts him. He needs to develop a better understanding of his surroundings, identify possible weapons and escape routes, and neutralize threats. So far, Tron hasn’t completed any of these tasks.

His feet, enclosed in soft pouches Sam refers to as ‘socks,’ scuff against the hard, sleek floor. The socks seem incompatible with effective combat; they increase his chances of slipping during complex maneuvers and decrease his ability to move silently. But Sam, for whatever reason, deemed the socks necessary enough to dress Tron in them- maybe there’s a ground-level hazard in this world that can be nullified by socks?

Tron’s eyes find the door again.

He’s already memorized every physical aspect of it, from size parameters to the various hex triplets present in the grainy texture of the door. There’s nothing left to do except to open it and move on.

_ Why should this millicycle be different than all the others you’ve spent inactive, evaluating the door? _

Tron pushes the thought aside. He doesn’t owe it to anyone to justify every decision he makes, not anymore. And he feels more functional, more effective (he feels _better_) than he has in hundreds of cycles. Still testing the slide of his socks against the floor, he walks to the door, blanks his mind, and twists the handle. 

The air outside his room runs colder than the air inside, hissing out from a grate on the wall. Stepping up on his toes, Tron traces a finger along the outer edge of the device, catching a dull film of dust on his skin. He wipes the dirt off on his hip, leans over the hallway railing- the way down from upstairs, he realizes, consists of two vertical poles connected by a number of shorter, horizontal ones. It isn’t the most convenient method of descent, but the user world operates differently than the Grid: less sleek, but consistently soft.

Tron crawls down the structure of poles, keeps his back to the wall as he scans the room.

One door, nondescript and sturdy, marks the wall opposite him; narrow windows (too small to fit through) line the top of the corrugated, metal wall to his left, whereas the wall to his right is made entirely of glass. Moving toward the massive windows, Tron touches knuckles against the transparent surface. He doesn’t understand, doesn’t connect to the underlying data that makes up the user world, so Tron can’t request an automatic reading on the pressure and breakage resistance of the glass. 

Half-blinded, restricted, he judges that the windows are reinforced, but he could shatter them with ease. An aggressor with the basic performance abilities of most programs could similarly batter their way through the glass, and he doesn’t think user windows are protected by coded permissions to hinder intruders. 

The larger windows, in addition, lead to an abrupt downward slope toward a narrow body of water- polluted? Narrowing his eyes, he assesses the murky color of the water, lacking the knowledge needed to compare it to other samples of user water. Assuming the water isn’t infected by viruses or prone to causing glitches, it would be easy to both hide and navigate inside it.

Abruptly, Tron looks up from the water, finally _ seeing _the dull city looming over it. Bulky towers cut sharp lines, in industrial black and grey, against the sky, each layer of windows reflecting white-hot sunlight marking another thirty, another forty users populating the city.

How densely packed is the user population in this sector? Is he looking at the equivalent of Bismuth or Purgos?

How many users would Clu have terminated in this city if he had succeeded?

Even the sky itself seems too large for Tron to comprehend, colored vivid blue, knotted around whorls and cords of white- clouds, he thinks, but more rounded and tranquil than the clouds that carry storms through the Grid. The sun shoots streaks of bruised, golden light across the horizon. It’s smothering, as if the sky is pushing down instead of opening up, laying the weight of infinite gold-blue-stagnant code on the glass tops of buildings. 

Tron stumbles back.

The side of his foot clips the edge of a chair and he lowers himself onto his hands and knees, to his side, on a mat laid out on top of the floor. The stiff fibers in the mat press against his face, barely painful, and Tron desperately focuses on the _ minutiae_. Short, wiry fibers, colored a shade brighter than dust, painting a slow gradient to the patterns of cool grey-blue on the opposite end of the mat. Tron lets his circuits spark with vague unease and discomfort, and he switches his ventilation to manual, cycling energy through his body until he isn’t running as bright as an overcharged program in a club.

Something _ snaps. _

Opening his eyes, Tron rolls into a low crouch. He’s unarmed, without disks, but he’s never needed disks to derez. Foreign and familiar, an uneven, hacking growl clicks low in his chest- he briefly gags against it- but he’s never needed silence, either, to nullify his targets.

He identifies the source of the noise quickly. A flap of some pliant material, covering a neat, rectangular hole in the door, opened and slapped down. The thing that disturbed the flap looks up at Tron, head cocked to one side, eyes damp and deeply black as the Sea of Simulation. Four legs, lower life form- Gridbug?

No indications of aggression, of confusion, only of curiosity, and the being seems more comfortable in Sam’s home than Tron does- tentative, he changes his assessment to ‘Bit.’

“You’re Marv,” Tron acknowledges, his voice warping around his growl. “Sam talks about you.” Marv is, according to Sam, a dog. His purpose is twofold: he serves as entertainment and as the security unit for the house. “Can you understand me?”

Wriggling with the force of several high-pitched, wheezing breaths, Marv licks his nose. 

“I don’t understand you,” Tron admits. He barely understands himself, or the fact that he's talking, words formulating in his processors as if they were never disables. He doesn’t see Marv as a threat, he thinks- the dog tilts its head, nose scrunching up, and instinctive calm flows through Tron's circuits, his body relaxeing out of its defensive position. His snarl fades…

The sound of Rinzler, to the programs on the Grid, was the sound of deresolution. The sound of Rinzler, to Tron, was an unending, misshapen scream, the ironic sound of continued life, of unvoiced pleading for an end- Sam Flynn gifted Tron an end to his captivity, though not in a way Tron could’ve ever expected, but the user was not able to repair the vocal malfunctions in Tron’s code.

The growl appears when he’s agitated, but Tron _ isn’t _ agitated in Marv’s presence.

“Your function is to keep Sam Flynn and Quorra safe,” he tells Marv. The dog twitches its long, strangely shaped ears. “We are allies.”

Marv steps forward, his small feet tapping over the floor, until the dog stands within Tron’s reach, _ smelling _his hands and knees. “What are you doing?” Huffing, Marv nuzzles against Tron’s knuckles, leaving behind a faint trail of slime- although the dog doesn’t speak, Tron knows he is still capable of communication. Rinzler was capable of it, despite that Clu didn’t permit him to talk.

He interprets Marv’s curious sniffing as a gentle query of intentions, maybe identity. When Marv whines and _ licks _Tron’s hand, Tron infers that it’s a gesture of acceptance or greeting. 

He doesn’t know the protocol for returning a dog’s greeting.

“Marv-” Tron tries turning his hand, hiding the back of it from Marv, but the dog proceeds to coat every voxel in his palm with fetid saliva. Marv is waiting for reciprocated acknowledgment, Tron thinks, but he isn’t sure how to give it; desperate, he picks the dog up by it front feet and licks the broad, white patch of hair above his nose. 

_ Users, _it’s awful- there are fibers stuck to his tongue-

In a rapid flick of motion, Marv manages to lick the tip of Tron’s nose before he sets the dog down. “Was that sufficient?” Tron asks, running his tongue over his teeth. Marv pants happily, his tail beating against his flanks. Tron spits.

Sensing sharp tension in the muscles coiled through Marv’s shoulders, he decides that if lets Marv go, the dog will probably continue licking. Tron doesn’t want to get wet, and he doesn’t want to be required to lick Marv in return. “Stay still,” he orders. _ “Still.”_

The dog drops into a seated position, vibrating with energy, but otherwise motionless. Tron slides his fingers deeper into the short, pilose outer layer covering Marv’s form. The dog is distinctly unlike cotton to the touch, its hairs separated, not woven together, creating an alternative sensation of softness. (But he is soft, regardless. Tron expands his files to incorporate the new information.) Combing through white and black bristles, Tron’s fingertips bump against raised, uneven skin. _ Scars. _

Tron has scars, too. Most, he can hide under clothing- or under a gridsuit, at least, if not the short-sleeved cotton shirts Sam provides him with. But he has scars he can’t disguise, thick bands of glitched flesh that crawl up the side of his neck, over his jaw, and onto his eye. In the Grid, the scar manifests as a jagged, discolored stripe of dull grey and black, smooth and hard to the touch, inflexible. In the users’ world, however, the scar became a mass of ribbed, twisted skin, faintly pink in some areas and a thin, yellowed white in others. 

(Once, Sam had told Tron that Marv was a rescue. ‘Like you and Quorra,’ he had said. ‘You’re all safe here.’)

“You’re like me,” Tron informs Marv. “Damaged. But Sam still trusts you."

Marv is like Tron. Like every living unit that Tron has ever encountered. He _isn't _incompatible with the users' world, and the realization shakes him down to the core of his programming. 

He’d thought he’d forgotten what it is to have _ hope_\- a sick feeling, unsteady with relief and trepidation and the pains of healing- but Tron thinks the beginnings of it have burned in his circuits for a while now, too faint to be easily noticed. Now, the emotion strengthens, and Tron curls up around himself and Marv, almost startled.

“I fight for the users, too,” he whispers. Marv blinks slowly. “It’s my directive. I want it to be my directive.”

Initially, he had left his room on the assumption that something would cave inside of him, that he would drag himself back into shivering dreams, into half-consciousness, waiting to fade. Now, he feels more awake, more completely rebooted, than he can remember since…

Since long before Clu.

Holding Marv, he sits on the floor and waits for Sam and Quorra to come home.


End file.
